John Greenleaf Whittier (18071892). The Poetical Works in Four Volumes. 1892.

Religious Poems

The Prayer of Agassiz

The island of Penikese in Buzzards Bay was given by Mr. John Anderson to Agassiz for the uses of a summer school of natural history. A large barn was cleared and improvised as a lecture-room. Here, on the first morning of the school, all the company was gathered. Agassiz had arranged no programme of exercises, says Mrs. Agassiz, in Louis Agassiz; his Life and Correspondence, trusting to the interest of the occasion to suggest what might best be said or done. But, as he looked upon his pupils gathered there to study nature with him, by an impulse as natural as it was unpremeditated, he called upon them to join in silently asking Gods blessing on their work together. The pause was broken by the first words of an address no less fervent than its unspoken prelude. This was in the summer of 1873, and Agassiz died the December following.